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Eclipse Open Source Embedded and Mobile Initiatives

The Eclipse Foundation recently announced new initiatives to develop open source technologies for embedded and mobile developers. The new initiatives, part of the Eclipse Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) Project, make it easier for developers to debug, manage and deploy software on embedded and mobile devices. These new projects build on the continued success the Eclipse community has had in creating open source technology for the embedded and mobile industry.

The four new initiatives include:

Real-Time Software Components (RTSC)
Led by Texas Instruments, RTSC is a new project that will focus on developing Eclipse tools for the development and configuration of C (and C++) applications for highly constrained devices such as digital signal processors (DSPs) and microcontrollers. RTSC supports a C-based programming model for developing, delivering and deploying embedded real-time software components targeted for diverse, highly resource-constrained hardware platforms.

Windows Embedded CE Support
New support for Windows Embedded CE in the Eclipse Target Management project allows those who are developing Windows CE applications to remotely edit, update and delete files directly on the Windows Embedded CE device. This unique feature makes Eclipse a very productive environment for building Windows CE applications.

Eclipse Device Debugging (DD) Project
The 1.0 release of the Eclipse Device Debugging project will be made available as part of the Ganymede release train in June. Central to DD is the Debugger Services Framework (DSF), an extensible framework designed to allow commercial tool vendors to build advanced debugger integrations in Eclipse. DSF includes a reference implementation, contributed by Ericsson, which supports debugging via the popular and ubiquitous GDB debug engine.

Target Communications Framework (TCF)
TCF is a new initiative started to develop a lightweight extensible communications protocol to standardize the way development tools – including debuggers, monitoring, analysis and test tools – communicate with different devices. A number of organizations, including Wind River, Freescale and Power.org are involved with the development of TCF. The protocol is designed to work for target agents, JTAG probes and target simulators, and allows value-adding components from multiple vendors to plug together easily, targeting heterogeneous device configurations like multicore and system-on-a chip (SoC).